Information on Bodmer’s life is scanty, but it is known that he lived in Switzerland, England, France, and Austria. Because many of his ideas were in advance of their time, his manufacturing ventures were not always successful. In 1803, at St. Blaise in the Black Forest, he established a small firearms factory, employing a special series of machines to make interchangeable parts.

Bodmer later made three visits to England, the first in 1816, when he visited ironworks, engineering shops, and textile mills. In 1824 he established a small factory at Bolton, Lancashire, to manufacture machinery that made the process from carding to spinning wool continuous. Though this machinery was widely adopted in England and later in the United States and is said to have revolutionized the industry, its inventor does not appear to have profited, for that venture also failed, and he returned for a time to the European continent.

In 1833 he set up a machine shop in Manchester, equipped with machine tools he had designed and constructed for himself. Between 1839 and 1841 he patented more than 40 specialized machine tools that he then set up in an ingenious factory-type arrangement to produce parts from iron and steel. One of the most important was a machine to make gears; it could cut teeth of predetermined pitch, form, and depth in a metal blank. Bodmer also patented various steam-engine devices and is credited with inventing the cylinder with opposed pistons.